Bell, Book, and Candle

It is official. It is now ‘codified’ into church law: “A person who attempts to confer a sacred order on a woman, and the woman who attempts to receive the sacred order,” will receive automatic excommunication. 

Most of the news services used variations on these words: “While the church has for centuries banned women from becoming priests, the previous code of 1983 said only that priestly ordination is reserved for a ‘baptized male’. Now, there is a code that stipulates specifically that both the person who attempts to confer ordination on a woman and the woman herself incur automatic excommunication and that the cleric risks being defrocked.”

Bizarrely, The Washington Post inserted a link within its report titled “Final Blow to Their Cause” which sounded ominous until you followed it. The only link was to Kate McElwee’s both reasoned and passionate commentary on the WOC website (and in many news sources) which in no way signaled either “final” or “blow”! 

What we do have, as Kate said, is a “painful reminder” once again of what we’re up against and, yes, that initial “shock” and then “appall.” But she takes us back to our sources of resilience as we demand that the church “demands” women included as equal partners in leadership and ministry. As Miriam Duignan from WOW reminded us in 2019: “The consequences of this massive injustice are far-reaching beyond the church. It’s not just a matter of who stands at the altar each Sunday and blesses the bread … women are silenced and sidelined, and this has a tidal effect beyond the priesthood in terms of how women are seen.”

So how do we go forward? 

Those very words are the title of a New York Times reflection by Ramah Commanday, 70, a ceramist, who, on the eve of Yom Kippur, suddenly had to leave all behind to escape the Glass Fire that completely destroyed her home in California last year: “By nightfall, my world of home and objects was gone.”

When she could finally return, “What I was able to dig up was a ruined, a completely ruined version of itself.” But her kiln did remain: “I actually found a few pieces of my work that were intact, and a few more that were repairable, which I did. The act of repairing the broken pieces was healing. The rest I just walked away from.”

She then described a reaction that surprised her. She found herself focusing on what she had rather than what she lost: “The intensity of that refocus really took me by surprise. I am as amazed as anybody.”  Moreover, she writes: “I feel braver than I did before all of this happened. This is a kind of resilience that is real, and I am not alone in it.” 

She mentions the truly heavy past and present crises we have gone through or are confronting now. She is Jewish and had heard personal Holocaust stories as she grew up. She was at home during the fire only because of the pandemic. She mentions climate change disasters, political instabilities, the preponderance of grief and suffering this past year. All of these, including so many more we, ourselves, could add, may seem so much more weighty than casting ordained women and those who ordain them as sinners on par with sex abusers. They are and they are not; it’s all profoundly interconnected.

She finally asks the critical question, however, that I ask also in regard to our situation: “How do we go forward? Do we give up or not? And if you choose not to give up, how do you keep going?”  

Here are some sample answers she gives: “There are the people who are creating their own personal bunkers, either literally or metaphorically. Then there are people who just figure, we have to find a way of joining hands and plodding forward. What do we have as human beings that is not evil, that is not destructive, that is the opposite? What about art? What about kindness? What do we have that we can call on so we can live out our lives, deriving as much joy and positive experience as we can?” (I would add “and bringing about justice to the world, its peoples, and fellow creatures.”) Because, as she reminds us, “wasting our lives, or living our lives in a state of misery insofar as we have any control over it, is unbearable. … I am alive, I am still here, and what can I do about it?”

The old way of performing “excommunication by anathema” imposed on anyone who had committed an especially grievous sin in the Latin Church was done as publicly as possible and often involved the objects “bell, book, and candle”.  

The bishop would give a prescribed recitation listing all the excommunicated person was losing on earth and beyond, especially his or her place in the bosom of the Holy Mother Church and the society of all Christians as well as no less than Heaven itself. The priests attending would respond, “So be it” and the bishop would then ring the bell, close the holy book, and all would snuff out a candle and dash it to the floor. “After the ritual, written notices would be sent to the neighboring bishops and priests to report that the target had been anathematized and why, so that they and their constituents were not to hold communication with the target. The frightful pronouncements of the ritual were calculated so as to strike terror into the ones so excommunicated and bring them to repentance.”

Perhaps our first response to this latest “painful reminder” of our exclusion is to turn those symbols around: to silence, rather than ring, the bell of injustice by continuing our witness for it, to open, rather than close, the holy book of renewed wisdom and live by it, and to light, rather than smother, the flames of courage everywhere we find them.